Real Heroes Helping the Homeless

City Mission resident and volunteer Marc Benton sets up cots on Tuesday for those who will be brought in from the extreme cold weather. (Sharon Cantillon/Buffalo News)

As I clicked into the Buffalo News tonight, a story about homeless shelters was on the front page. It is cold night here in Buffalo. You, me and a lot of others are sitting comfortably in our warm homes. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there who have no home and nowhere to go to escape the harshness winter brings.

The homeless are Buffalo’s forgotten. But thankfully, they are not forgotten by everyone. Tonight and many other nights when the weather gets bad, there are teams of people out there in the freezing cold looking for the chronically homeless to ensure they have a warm place to go and be taken care of.

From Raine Schreiner, director of client services at the City Mission from the story:

“It’s just a really humbling experience, to see people living in the cracks and crevices of Buffalo,” she said. “I think when you don’t see it so much here, you ignore it or think it doesn’t exist.”

For all the people we tout as heroes for all the wrong reasons, the ones who are part of this story are the real deal. The work they do isn’t measured in dollars…it is measured by the lives they protect.